notes from the life of a CSA member

10/27 Moisture alert and the world’s most beautiful radishes

Get to your produce right away this week. The incredibly humid past couple of days will mess up your stash fast. My produce was practically dripping when I pulled it out of the box.

Pull it out, dry it off, and rebag it. Just turn the bag it came in inside out. If it’s leafy stuff, put a paper towel in the bag to absorb some of the moisture.

And remember it’s great to have some rain!

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There were lots of colorful things in this week’s box, but the radishes were the most amazing. They are so big, bright, and smooth.

The baby squash are really pretty, too.

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To carve or not to carve? This beautiful, dark orange pumpkin is a pie pumpkin, which means I could bake it like a winter squash and make pie, soup, or just baked pumpkin.

Or we could make a jack-o-lantern. I’ll talk it over with Chris and decide.

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Lettuce and grape tomatoes

No clever ideas necessary here – just salad with tomatoes (and beautiful radishes). These little tomatoes also make great snacks.

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Arugula smells so dreamy when you dump it out of the bag! I like arugula best as salad, but we’ve got so much salad, that I will blanch and freeze this in preparation for a creamy pasta dish in the future.

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Enormous and pretty pac choi! Pac choi leaves have wonderful color and texture. These leaves are large enough to make stir-fry “cabbage wraps.” Basically the idea is to steam the leaves just until they’re pliable. (Microwave them in a stack like tortillas, for example.) Then load them up with stir-fried vegetables or seasoned meat or curried lentils or whatever. Treat the stems like celery. Chop them up and add them to stir-fries or soup.

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Them’s baking apples, but you can snack on them in a pinch. They taste like sour apple candy. I’m going to core, peel, halve and roast these, however, to give me an excuse to make more bourbon sauce.

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Carolina Gold rice, eggs, and Sea Island red peas

The rice and the peas will hang out in the fridge for a while. I’ve got too much produce to be eaten first before resorting to dried foods. One possibility, though, is making fried rice or steaming this rice and using it as part of the pac choi wrap filling.